KS Project Update #12: Production Update: First Machines are Now Shipping!
Project Update #12: Production Update: First Machines are Now Shipping! Rest to follow shortly!
Posted by Full Spectrum Laser ♥ Like |
We’ve been hard at work on the Pegasus Touch and happy to announce today that we are starting shipments of our Level 7 printers! We are shipping 5 printers this week and expect to ship the rest of the Level 6 and Level 7 orders in the coming two weeks. Here is the assembly line in our Las Vegas office. As you can see, we have all committed printers in stock and many are already assembled.
https://ci6.googleusercontent.com/pr...JPG?1398718287Printer Assembly Line In Las Vegas
1) Completely redesigned printer mechanicals. We changed over to an innovative single motor design which greatly increases stiffness and reliability while reducing assembly/calibration time. Other SLA type printers have a second tilt motor which often creates artifacts while printing due to print shifting. In the end, Pegasus has far superior output over the original design due to greatly improved mechanical design.
https://ci3.googleusercontent.com/pr...jpg?1398718363New Updated Pegasus Touch 3D Printer Mechanicals
2) To focus the laser spot size to ~80um and bring the price down to a reasonable level, we have taken all the laser module assembly in house. The custom lens needs to be positioned to an accuracy of a few nanometers away from the diode and we needed to come up with very precise custom mounting solutions. We have purchased extremely advanced laser beam profiler test equipment for focusing modules and gone through at least 5 different mounts and fixturing techniques until we got it right. Now we have much smaller spot sizes with high reliability. In addition to improving our reducing spot sizes, we have been able to improve beam quality to nearly perfect Gaussian beam profiles due to our custom aspheric laser lens solution.
3) To increase calibration speed and accuracy we have developed custom machine vision software to calibrate across the printing field. We can automatically calibrate machines in house in just a few minutes. In addition, we have our end user calibration software routines for users needing to tweak their machines in the field. We are also going to make the field calibration files available to be exported as CSV files for further manipulation by our advanced users.
4) Beta software download will be ready to download in the next few days from our website fsl3d.com
5) Please direct all questions/comments to our google groups as we no longer monitor Kickstarter regularly:https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/fsl3d
Minor issues:
1) We are currently making vats/resin trays made from glued together acrylic at the moment. Since they are glued together and made from acrylic which is brittle, they are a bit more fragile. We made an injection molded version out of stronger plastic with seamless joints that will be ready in the beginning of May. Since the vats are consumable and intended to be discarded after printing through a few liters of resin, we do not need to wait for the injection molded ones. If you are Level 6 or Level 5 backer and want us to hold your order to wait for the injection vats let us know. We anticipate the injection molded vats to be ready for all other levels so it’s a non-issue. Additional replacement vats will not be available until our injection ones are shipping (expect late May).
2) Our current shipping boxes are ready but untested. We are slow shipping the first few units first to our US customers and getting feedback from our customers that receive them to ensure nothing is broken during the shipping process. Due to much higher shipping prices, we are holding international orders for a few weeks until we get box opening feedback in case we need to change something in the packaging. Please let us know if you encounter any issues when you open the box.
3) Due to changes in reducing the spot size which greatly increases energy density of the laser beam, we were tweaking resin formulations until the last minute. Now we have a locked down formulation, we are sending it to our independent chemical contractor to produce the suitable MSDS and high volume bottling. Currently we are producing the resin in house with lower volume capabilities than our chemical contractors which have the necessary stirring/bottling facilities. We are using the resin we produce in house to get machines out the door rather than filling resin orders. Other resin orders may see some delay as we are ramping up production. We have all base components in stock so we anticipate to resolve all resin availability by late May.
4) Pegasus Touch software/firmware is constantly being updated. You should consider yourself a beta tester of the first machines off the assembly line. If you prefer to not have a beta tester experience, let us know and we can hold your printer for July delivery when we believe all the major issues should be worked out.
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